LG OLED TV coming late March for $11,999

LG says it has exorcised the OLED demons from its factories, and is able to manufacture and sell OLED TVs in commercial quantities, starting this month.

John Davidson

LG executives are coming and going from the stage here at the opening press conference on the opening day at the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas, and I can barely be bothered listening to a word they say.

Something about a washing machine that you can program from your smart phone?

It’s hard to pay attention to their speeches (which I am sure are very practiced and terribly good) when off to the left of the stage is a LG’s soon-to-be-released 55-inch OLED TV, showing videos of green tree frogs and exploding paint balloons that are far more vivid than anything centre stage. Apologies to the execs. Nothing personal. Nobody could compete with the new TV, which frankly looks incredible, and which I would certainly buy when it comes to Australia in late March if only I had a lazy $11,999 lying around.

Though, this is a little confusing: the one on the stage is the new model, which is “as thin as a pencil” and has a stand shaped like a flamingo’s neck, but that’s not the model that will be released in March for $11,999. LG says that it will be a slightly older OLED TV that will go on sale in Australia, which presumably makes it the same model that attracted so much attention at last year’s CES, but which never came out in 2012 due to to reported manufacturing difficulties.

OLED, which stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes, is said to be very difficult to manufacture, especially in the large screen sizes that people like to watch nowadays, which explains why the technology has promised so much for so long, but has delivered so little to TV viewers.

But now, at long last, LG says it has exorcised the OLED demons from its factories, and is able to manufacture and sell OLED TVs in commercial quantities, starting this month in Korea and starting March in the US, Australia and elsewhere.

The flamingo-shaped TV set that LG is showing off at CES has deep blacks and rich, saturated colours, both of which are standard features of OLED displays, but it also has crisp, bright whites, which LG says it has achieved by adding an extra, white pixel to the standard array of red, green and blue pixels found in regular OLED TVs. Whether the TV going on sale in March uses the same WRGB array of pixels, or just the standard RGB, isn’t terribly clear at this stage. If it’s just RGB, then it may well be worth waiting a little longer, for the pencil-thin, flamingo-shaped, WRGB model, because it looks stunning. I can’t take my eyes off it. I think the speeches may have finished.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.

BY John Davidson

John Davidson is the award-winning sketch writer in charge
of Australia's pre-eminent (but sadly fictitious) Digital Life
Laboratories. A former computer programmer, documentary maker and
foreign correspondent, John now reviews all the gadgets he can ill
afford to own.